Niklas Forsberg

Jan Patočka opens “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” by indicating that philosophers always tend to focus on questions about the mortality or immortality of the soul when thinking about death, and that he wants to take a different route focusing instead on the phenomenology of the afterlife and the ways the diseased others live in us. And this is what the major bulk of the text focuses on. But as Patočka’s unfinished text is about to end, he leaves us with a peculiar addendum that signals that a return to the more traditional questions – about death as mine – is necessary. In this text, I seek to elucidate what the phenomenology of afterlife brings to the traditional discussion about death as mine (and about my “soul”). One of the more prominent and well-developed modern theories that discuss death as mine is Derek Parfit’s. Thus, the effort in this text is to find out what Patočka’s phenomenology can teach us about Parfit’s theory.

This article explores one central assumption that is guiding large portions of contemporary (analytic) moral philosophy: the idea that moral philosophy has to be forward-looking and action-guiding. By paying attention to a number of examples, it is argued that this guiding assumption flies in the face of important aspects of actual moral life. Moral situations are not (always) of the nature that we can plan for them, and reason about them in advance. Rather, the moral reality, or the moral contexts, are often such that the moral situation is created in the scene, and hence something that is only available to reflect upon in hindsight. There are, at least, two central reasons why this is so: The first is that the sense, meaning, of the actions and the concepts we use in reflection about them, are not locked beforehand, and our understanding of them are formed in the process. The second reason is that moral situations come about in a responsive, rather than planned, way. That is, we discover our moral world by means of our reactive interactions, rather than in theoretical reflection that aims to produce “anticipated beliefs.” Thus, this article suggests a way of exploring morality’s backward-looking nature that does not misrepresent moral reality.

The way that Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals begins may seem perplexing since it does not state in a clear way what the aims and purposes of the book are, nor does it say anything about methodology. This chapter aims to show how this peculiar opening, rightly understood, functions as an entrance to an understanding of the book as a whole, and to make clear why the opening chapter’s focus on the concept of art is the right place to start. Murdoch’s view of metaphysics is that we are always guided by a worldview, i.e. by unified images that are historical and changing. Art functions as a mirror of its time that help to bring the background of our lives and thoughts into view.

A number of factors-new research into human and animal consciousness, a heightened awareness of the methods and consequences of intensive farming, and modern concerns about animal welfare and ecology-have made our relationship to animals an area of burning interest in contemporary philosophy. Utilizing methods inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, the contributors to this volume explore this area in a variety of ways. Topics discussed include: * scientific vs. non-scientific ways of describing human and animal behaviour * the ethics of eating particular animal species * human nature, emotions, and instinctive reactions * responses of wonder towards the natural world * the moral relevance of literature * the concept of dignity * the question of whether non-human animals can use language This book will be of great value to anyone interested in philosophical and interdisciplinary issues concerning language, ethics and humanity's relation to animals and the natural world.

This book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of J.L. Austin’s philosophy. It opens new ways of thinking about ethics and other contemporary issues in the wake of Austin’s philosophical work. Austin is primarily viewed as a philosopher of language whose work focused on the pragmatic aspects of speech. His work on ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory is seen as his main contribution to philosophy. This book challenges this received view to show that Austin used his most well-known theoretical notions as heuristic tools aimed at debunking the fact/value dichotomy. Additionally, it demonstrates that Austin’s continual returns to the ordinary is rooted in a desire to show that our lives in language are complicated and multifaceted. What emerges is an attempt to think with Austin about problems that are central to philosophy today—such as the question about linguistic inheritance, truth, the relationship between a language inherited and morality, and how we are to cope with linguistic elasticity and historicity. Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on Austin’s philosophy, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy. Table of Contents 1. Approaching Austin 2. Approaching Language? 3. Lessons from Sense and Sensibilia 4. A Plea for Phenomenology: On Austin’s Method 5. Testimony and Knowledge 6. All the Locutions 7. Our Word is Our Bond

What is it we do when we philosophize about a word? How are we to act as we ask the philosophical question par excellence, “What is …?” These questions are addressed here with particular focus on Troy Jollimore's Love's Vision and contemporary theories of love. Jollimore's rationalist account of love, based on a specific understanding of “reasons for love,” illustrates a particular philosophical mistake: When we think about a word, we are prone to believe that even though “the sense of the word” that we investigate may be up for grabs, the other words we use when we do these investigations are not. Jollimore's exploration of love is guided by specific conceptions of “reasons” and “rationality” that remain unquestioned. The article argues that we may have to rethink a great number of words as we embark on the task of uncovering the sense of one word.

“Not with that!” I shout. The hammer lies cradled in the Colonel’s folded arms. “You would not use a hammer on a beast, not on a beast!” In a terrible surge of rage I turn on the sergeant and hurl him from me. Godlike strength is mine. In a minute it will pass: let me use it while it lasts! “Look!” I shout. I point to the four prisoners who lie docilely on the earth, their lips to the pole, their hands clasped to their faces like monkey’s paws, oblivious of the hammer, ignorant of what is going on behind them, relieved that the offending mark has been beaten from their backs, hoping that the punishment is at an end. I raise my broken hand to the sky. “Look!” I shout. “We are the great miracle of creation! But from..

This chapter brings together Murdoch’s thoughts about language with other central aspects of her thought such as love, attention, perfectionism and morality. By making clear how Murdoch’s variety of linguistic philosophy differs from contemporary philosophy of language, this paper also shows that Murdoch’s philosophy contains the seeds for a fruitful form of philosophizing which brings the moral and aesthetic dimensions of language into view. “Taking the linguistic method seriously” means making clear the ways in which all concepts belong to a fabric that is changing on a personal level as well as an historical one. One of the things that Murdoch can help us see is that one problem with contemporary philosophy of language, is that it does not take the linguistic method seriously enough.

Language Lost and Found takes as its starting-point Iris Murdoch's claim that "we have suffered a general loss of concepts." By means of a thorough reading of Iris Murdoch's philosophy in the light of this difficulty, it offers a detailed examination of the problem of linguistic community and the roots of the thought that some philosophical problems arise due to our having lost the sense of our own language. But it is also a call for a radical reconsideration of how philosophy and literature relate to each other on a general level and in Murdoch's authorship in particular.

How is one to navigate between a thinking grounded in the individual and a claim for communality? In Emerson, this kind of difficulty comes into view in familiar sentences such as Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.’ How does the relationship between the personal and the universal look and function? In this paper, it is argued that Emerson may bring us clarity regarding the difficulties we are facing when it comes to questions about how we are to frame human personality, morality, and knowledge in the field of tension created by distinctions such as private/public, original/conventional, and particular/universal. A crucial thought in this line of reasoning is that that the critical philosophy Emerson pursues is also self-critical. The idea that true critique is self-criticism is then used as a tool to make clear that there’s no fundamental gap to be bridged here. The self-critical dimension makes clear the ways in which coming to share a world—learning from one’s tea...

How is one to navigate between a thinking grounded in the individual and a claim for communality? In Emerson, this kind of difficulty comes into view in familiar sentences such as Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.’ How does the relationship between the personal and the universal look and function? In this paper, it is argued that Emerson may bring us clarity regarding the difficulties we are facing when it comes to questions about how we are to frame human personality, morality, and knowledge in the field of tension created by distinctions such as private/public, original/conventional, and particular/universal. A crucial thought in this line of reasoning is that that the critical philosophy Emerson pursues is also self-critical. The idea that true critique is self-criticism is then used as a tool to make clear that there’s no fundamental gap to be bridged here. The self-critical dimension makes clear the ways in which coming to share a world—learning from one’s teachers for example—is a matter of earning (shared) words. Therefore, Emersonian self-cultivation does not stand apart from the cultivation of something shared, but should be seen as a form of path towards a shared world.

Focusing on the penultimate chapter of Collingwood's An Essay on Philosophical Method, this paper offers a re-evaluation of several points in leading interpretations of his philosophy. It is argued that this chapter, 'Philosophy as a Branch of Literature', invites us to rethink the relation between a systematic or problem-oriented and an historical or exegetical philosophy; how linguistic analysis (particularly in the form of ordinary language philosophy) relates to the history of philosophy; and how the question of literature in philosophy is not merely a question about literature, but of philosophy. In contrast to influential interpreters such as e.g. Connelly and D'Oro, it is here argued that Collingwood (a) offers a profound criticism of the idea that philosophical problems are eternal, (b) invites us to deepen our understanding of ordinary language philosophy aswell as (c) the idea of a therapeutic method in philosophy, and (d) problematizes the tendency to think that the question about the form philosophical writing takes is a secondary issue that can be side-stepped